Notes From SIGGRAPH 2011 (Part 2)

Notes From SIGGRAPH 2011 (Part 2)

"For most artists the problem is not piracy,
but obscurity"
-Cory Doctorow, Keynote Speaker

Vancouver is a walker's city. The 20-minute
walk I took to the SIGGRAPH convention center every morning was a
way to clear my head and breathe the morning air. It was also a
pleasure, since many public buildings had waterfalls or carefully
cultivated flowers and trees. Not to mention that almost every
other block in the Downtown area of Vancouver had a coffee house.
And the closer I got to the convention center, the more I smelled
the ocean and heard the myriad seagulls crying. More than once I
found myself simply stopping, closing my eyes and taking a deep
breath. Most of the flood of people walking with you to the
conference were smiling and enjoying themselves as well. Every
morning at SIGGRAPH 2011 was a pleasure.

Walkers in downtown Vancouver enjoy lots of trees.

Monday, August 8th

With Monday, my SIGGRAPH 2011 schedule began in earnest.
Meetings, a panel, screenings, a computer graphics course and
dinner at the end made for a very packed day. I did manage to leave
a little time in for meetings and conversations that might happen
by accident. One thing I've learned from attending over the years,
is that you always make room for going off-schedule. Following
what's interesting when you can has proven to be very rewarding for
me. At the end of the day, I was to benefit from this policy as my
schedule didn't quite work out the way I had planned.

My first meeting of the day was at the gorgeous Fairmont
Pacific Rim hotel directly across the street from the
convention center. I met with Chris Bond and his crew from Thinkbox
Software, a "postproduction, visual-effects software
company" that creates solutions to "network
rendering and artists creation of images." The amazing
glass-walled suite they rented looked over the west convention
center and the harbor. It was hard at times not to gape at the
view, but I enjoyed Ryan Russel's presentation of Deadline 5.1, their Network Render Management System
which Thinkbox released in beta back in early August. I was also
fortunate to receive an excellent demo of Krakatoa MX 2.0, the latest version of
Thinkbox's highly regarded "high volume particle
rendering, manipulation and management toolkit," by an
obvious master of the program, Borislav "Bobo" Petrov. In addition
to unveiling Krakatoa MX 2.0 at SIGGRAPH 2011, Thinkbox also added
Krakatoa SR 2.0, which is a standalone volumetric particle renderer
that can be integrated with packages like Maya, Nuke or Houdini. I
was impressed with the presentations and came away wanting to learn
more.

Chris Bond, founder of ThinkBox Software.

After the Thinkbox meeting, I hustled back to the Media room to
collect my notes and check email. Then, I went to listen to the
keynote address which was to be given by Cory Doctorow, a noted
science fiction author, blogger/journalist (he is the co-editor of
boingboing.net) and copyright activist. It was a nice
touch for SIGGRAPH to invite Cory, who was born in Toronto, Canada,
and who doesn't have the same kind of agenda that many previous
keynote speakers at SIGGRAPH have had. He is a bit of a wild card,
and his keynote did not disappoint. With an undertone of righteous
indignation and anger, Cory delivered a machine-gun-style speech,
basically admonishing those in attendance to "Wake Up!"
and pay attention to what's being done to copyright around the
world (and US & Canada, in particular). It would take too long
to summarize his speech here. It's best to catch the whole thing
via ACM SIGGRAPH's YouTube channel. Essentially, Cory was trying
to "talk about the way that copyright can be made to work
for creators in the digital age, and why it's important for
everyone that we don't get it wrong."

He certainly succeeded in waking everyone up and getting us to
think about what's going on. A much appreciated keynote that was a
far cry from the traditional "feel good" keynotes of
previous years. Thank you very much, Cory.

SIGGRAPH 2011 keynote address by Cory Doctorow

I grabbed a surprisingly good lunch from the convention center
lunch stand and got back to the Media room for an appointment with
The
Foundry, a brilliant UK company that develops plug-ins and
applications, like the Furnace set of plug-ins and the compositing program
Nuke. Chances are, if you've seen any recent Hollywood
films, you've seen their applications and plug-ins at work. I was
very excited to meet with them and learn more about the newest
version of an application they sell called Mari, the ultra-modern 3D texture painting
application, originally used in creating the textures for the movie
Avatar. I also wanted to learn about the company in
general.

Andy Lomas (Katana product manager) and Jack Greasley (Mari product manager) gave me
the rundown on The Foundry's background, company philosophy and
their many applications and plug-ins. Both men were fun and
energetic, answering all of my many questions as if The Foundry was
part of their DNA. The half-hour spent with them went much too
fast. I hope to write a profile of The Foundry at some point in the
Fall, along with a review of Mari 1.4 (with PSD support), as I am
most intrigued with that application's support of the new Ptex textures originally
created by Disney Animation. What a great group of people! Be sure
to check The Foundry's gorgeous website,
too.

Jack Greasley and Andy Lomas at The Foundry meeting

Next up was my first SIGGRAPH 2011 Course: "Storytelling with Color," taught by two
professional colorists, Kathy Altieri and Dave
Walvoord, both of Dreamworks Animation. SIGGRAPH offers an
abundance of courses to attend that range from beginners to very
advanced. This course, which primarily used Kung Fu Panda
2 and the superb How to Train Your Dragon as the
films to draw examples from, was designed for an intermediate skill
level, but the course was so well presented that anyone could have
picked up on what Kathy and Dave were teaching.

"Color works on you like the music in a
scene," Kathy said as part of her "Analysis of Color
in Animated Films" section of the course. She was perfectly
matched by Dave's more technical analysis of "Color Supporting
the Story." They both spoke of the enormous amount of research
that goes into deciding on a color scheme for their films. The
audience (myself included) was literally glued to their seats with
the presentation. It's my hope that the two of them will write a
book on the subject. This course was easily one of the high points
of SIGGRAPH 2011, and I came away filled with ideas and inspired to
learn more about color and storytelling.

"Storytelling with Color" course at SIGGRAPH 2011

I decided after the Color course to skip the nVidia panel, as I
was going to attend the nVidia dinner later on in the evening, so I
caught me breath on one of the beautiful outdoor resting spots at
the Convention center. Looking out over the harbor and watching the
amphibious planes land on the harbor was most relaxing. Since I had
a few hours before the dinner, I decided to go through The Studio and the Art Gallery again. Doing this produced another
"accidental" meeting that I so enjoy experiencing at
SIGGRAPH. Going off on a tangent is always fun and exciting at the
conference, because you just never know where you will end up.

At The Studio, I watched several hands-on
workshops and spent time watching the many 3D printers working
away. Near the back of The Studio, I came across Michael Nikonov
with his laptop and Kinect motion-capture hardware developed
originally for the Xbox 360. Michael is the CEO of iPi Soft, a Russian
company that created a markerless motion capture application that
has had some success in the machinima world and other animation
markets. I knew Michael from last year's SIGGRAPH and we both were
happy to meet again.

Michael Nikonov demos iPi Soft motion capture software at The
Studio

Michael gave me an excellent demonstration of his software
capture system using the Kinect. I did some tai-chi motions and he
captured them and processed them in the iPi Soft application. After
some refinement (it took about 10 minutes), we had a minute's worth
of my motion ready to go in very usable form. Michael told me the
company was doing well. They have more development to do, but I'm
very interested in ipi Soft and plan on covering the software (and
the company) in more detail sometime in the Fall of 2011.

Promising to stay in touch, I left Michael and headed back to
the Media center to check my schedule and make some notes. The
Media center is where most of the journalists hang out. SIGGRAPH
does a good job of providing a comfortable atmosphere, along with
an interview area and rows of computers for those who don't have
laptops. We also get handouts and information from various
companies that are part of the Exhibition.

Unfortunately, I forgot to change the time the nVidia dinner was
taking place and missed the shuttle bus. I was disappointed that I
couldn't attend the press event, as I wanted to see what the
company was up to. Luckily, a good friend of mine who directs
machinima, Anima Technica, was in town and he invited me to
dinner with another friend, John Martin, from Reallusion, so the
evening ended pleasantly. John was in town to promote the upcoming
release of the 3D filmmaking tool iClone 5 at SIGGRAPH, so we had a ball talking
about this excellent movie-making program, and just generally
catching up. We had dinner in a loud, sports bar kind of
restaurant, but it didn't make any difference as the several hours
of conversation flew by.

John Martin of Reallusion, myself and Anima Technica, machinima
filmmaker at dinner

I finally walked back to my B&B around 9 PM, but it took me
several hours to fall asleep, as all of the people and ideas I had
encountered kept me buzzing. But I would need my sleep, as
tomorrow, Tuesday, would hold my busiest schedule for the week.

Ricky
Grove [gToon], Staff Columnist with the Renderosity Front
Page News. Ricky Grove is a bookstore clerk at the best bookstore
in Los Angeles, the Iliad Bookshop. He's also an actor and
machinima filmmaker. He lives with author, Lisa Morton, and three
very individual cats. Ricky is into Hong Kong films, FPS shooters,
experimental anything and reading, reading, reading. You can catch
his blog here.

August 23, 2011

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